The X Files

In 2005, an explosion in a group of abandoned buildings near the rubbish dump in Guatemala City unearthed a cavern of decaying files, the existence of which had until that point been denied, and each one a record of police activity and brutality during the 36 year civil war.

The Guatemalan National Police Archive is the largest single cache of documents that has been made available to human rights investigators in history, holding answers relating to deaths of the 200,000 people who were killed in the conflict, and offering hope of closure to families of over 400,000 people who were ''disappeared''.

Located in Zona 6 of the Capital, the entrance to the achives are unprepossessing to say the least. Abandoned cars and overgrown scrub land border a weather beaten cement courtyard, around which a collection of squat low ceiling-ed rooms harbour one of the most important discoveries to be made in Guatemala's recent past.

These records potentially incriminate a large number of powerful people, which makes being an employee here a pretty sketchy business. Indeed, just in case the whole thing wasn't quite Mission Impossible enough already, the consensus seems to be that, after the election next year, the new government will destroy these records.

The staff are careful to keep their faces covered as they work busily within this warren of cool tunnels and muffled sound. Each of them wear a synthetic mask which serves to protect them from inhaling the contaminated dust produced by stages of advanced decay and, perhaps more importantly, allowing them to maintain a level of anonymity. Many of them said that they didn't't even tell people outside of their close family that they were working on this project.

After 45 minutes or so of wandering through the halls, I became increasingly claustrophobic. Box upon box upon file upon file upon photos upon more boxes; scanners, photocopiers, a somewhat random and of a topless lady stapled to the wall; room after room of more people methodically dusting down sheets of long forgotten paperwork, each one with the potential to disclose yet another atrocity, yet another person who one day just stopped existing.

Many of the cardboard crates had doodles on the front, or even on the identification papers themselves within them: the date '1976', for example, surrounded by a crudely drawn pencil sketch of cartoon house, or a bird in flight, presumably penned by the same hand who had so carefully written down, on that same piece of paper, the nature by which they had disposed of a human life.

So what happens now? Could the discovery of the archives herald the beginning of a healing process, of cathartic communal grieving, of closure...? I don't know. I sincerely hope so. I am not wholey optimistic, however. The journalist who introduced us to the work happening at the project also seemed reserved on this topic. The political sitation here is far from stable, and it seems like only a matter of time before the lid is once against closed on this chamber of forgotten secrets and it becomes a tomb once again.

Standing outside, watching the wind silently flaking paint from the frame of an abandoned bicycle lying in the cracked dirt, surrounded by blank and faceless windows, it was almost as if I could hear the ghosts of the past whispering in the late afternoon breeze.